Accounting Software for the Mac

Tax time came around again, and that meant cleaning up the bank statements, and putting together a list of tax deductible expenditures. For this, we need software. KMyMoney on Linux is an outstanding free software package, and to be honest, none of these commercial packages are anywhere near as good. However, for the sake of the Mac experience, I gave them a try.

Liquid Ledger

• Imported all of my bank statements
• Wouldn't sort my entries by date, so they were all out of order. This made it impossible to verify the quality of the import
• Crashed doing a verify, losing all of the data

Bottom line: Buggy, prone to data loss

SEE Finance

• More polished than Liquid Ledger
• Imported all of my bank statements
• Found duplicates
• Incorrectly flagged some items as duplicates, which made reconciliation a PITA. You really have to pay attention to the duplicate resolution
• Doesn't import OFX "NAME" field, which means that all of the payees are wrong
• Categorization is difficult, because of previous point

Bottom line: Looks nice, but doesn't play well with bank statements, and categorization is difficult, so using it for taxes is not ideal.

Money

• Not as fancy as SEE Finance (fancy = visually pleasing)
• Importing was faster, and somehow seemed a bit more smooth
• Importing was perfect: duplicates were correctly found, and no false duplicates were made. Reconciliation was a breeze
• Categorization was pretty good. You can filter by keyword, select all, double-click, and set the category
• The reports could be better, and some of the results don't make much sense. For example, attempting to create a report that summarizes net worth generates a report with no values.

Bottom line: Getting data into it was flawlessly easy. Categorizing after he fact is reasonably easy.